Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (35 page)

HEY JUDE

Having taken up with Yoko Ono, John Lennon now demanded as expeditious a divorce as possible from his wife, relegating Cynthia and their son Julian to his past. He would see little of the boy in the years ahead.

Although Cyn had been part of the Beatles’ inner circle since the beginning of their great adventure - on the scene before Paul met Jane, Ritchie married Maureen, or George wed Pattie - she now fell into a state of purdah. Beatles people were scared of talking to Cyn lest it offend John. In fact, virtually the only member of the Beatles family who bothered to contact her after the break-up was Paul. To his credit, McCartney drove over to Kenwood to tell Cyn how sorry he was about the way John had treated her. Paul had hardly behaved better with Jane, and Cynthia believes Paul felt bad about that. ‘Paul blamed himself and was heartbroken,’ she later wrote, contradicting Tony Barrow’s impression that Paul wasn’t unduly bothered by the recent break-up with his fiancée. Paul may well have been more honest with an old friend like Cynthia than a male employee.

It was Paul’s habit to dream up songs on the drive to Kenwood, for this is where he and John met to write in the old days, and although the circumstances were very different as he drove to console Cyn, the act of making the journey engendered a song, intended to cheer up five-year-old Julian Lennon. ‘I started with the idea “Hey Jules”, which was Julian, “don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better.” Hey, try and deal with this terrible thing. I knew it was not going to be easy for him,’ Paul explained. ‘I always feel sorry for kids in divorces … their little brain spinning round in confusion, going “Did
I
do this? Was it me?”’ He later changed the title to ‘Hey Jude’ because it was more euphonious. Paul perfected the song at Cavendish while John and Yoko were visiting, John interpreting the lyric egocentrically to mean that Paul
approved
of his relationship with Yoko, that ‘go and get her’ meant he should leave Cyn for Yoko. Paul muttered that the words weren’t right yet. He needed to fix the dummy line, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder’. John insisted he keep it and, though it doesn’t make sense, it has become so familiar we don’t question it.

The Beatles recorded ‘Hey Jude’ at Trident, a small Soho studio the band was using, partly because it had an eight-track system, whereas EMI was behind the times with four-track. ‘Hey Jude’ was meant from the outset to be a single, rather than a
White Album
track, and it was an unusual single in several ways, not least because it was over seven minutes long at a time when most pop songs were under three. The song started quietly. Paul sang the first word ‘Hey …’ before a note had been struck, hitting the first F chord on the grand piano on the ‘Jude’, then accompanied himself through the first verse, joined by the others - George strumming guitar and harmonising with John; Ringo tapping a tambourine - from the middle of the second verse, after which Ringo’s drums came in and the song began to build. ‘Remember to let her under your skin/Then you begin to make it better,’ Paul sang, reaching the point where most singles end. Instead, he repeated the last word with increasing excitement, Little Richard-style: ‘Better, better, better, better BETTER, BETTER, BETTER …’ Finally screaming: ‘
WHAAARRRR!
’ This began the impassioned four-minute coda, the Beatles rocking out over a 36-piece orchestra as John and George repeated the Zen-like
Na na na na-na-na nas
. Seldom has such a simple refrain sounded so powerful.

While they were recording the song, the Apple Shop shut. It had failed to live up to the Beatles’ vision, the freeholder doing little to help by insisting they paint over the Fool’s genie mural, which was a grievous loss to Baker Street. ‘The Beatles are tired of being shopkeepers,’ Paul told the press. The band took away what items of stock they wanted, then let the public grab what was left for free. Before Francie Schwartz went home to the USA, she and Paul daubed ‘REVOLUTION’ and ‘HEY JUDE’ on the whitewashed windows of the abandoned building, as publicity for the new single. Unfortunately, this read like anti-Semitic graffiti to local Jewish residents (Jude being German for Jew), who reacted furiously, one man throwing a soda siphon at the shop.

More professionally, the Beatles hired Michael Lindsay-Hogg to shoot a promotional film for ‘Hey Jude’ at Twickenham. Talking with Paul, the director came up with the idea of surrounding the band with a small audience, who would sing along with the Beatles miming their own song. ‘We probably did, I think, five or six takes on “Hey Jude” and between the takes [the] Beatles were sort of standing on their rostrum and they were surrounded by 100 people and they did what they knew how to do when they had people round them,’ says Lindsay-Hogg. ‘This was the first time they’d ever played to any kind of audience since they’d stopped touring in 1966, and at first they were doing it rather listlessly because they thought they had to do something … then they sort of got into it, and they kind of liked it.’ The promo was first shown in the UK on David Frost’s Sunday night television show, then around the world, helping launch what became the Beatles’ biggest-selling single: number one in the UK for two weeks and number one in the USA for an astounding nine weeks, sales soon topping five million copies. This was all the more impressive when one remembers that the Beatles weren’t touring in support of the record and had only recently suffered a major critical failure with
Magical Mystery Tour
.

‘Hey Jude’ was the first Beatles record released by Apple, though it was actually still a Parlophone disc in the UK, Capitol in the US, with the Apple logo attached. The corporation had new offices now, an eighteenth-century townhouse at 3 Savile Row, on the border of Mayfair and Piccadilly, next door to the tailors Gieves & Hawkes. This was a fine address in a classy part of Central London, showing how high the boys had risen in the world in the few years since Neil transported them from Liverpool in a van. It was typical of the Beatles to be so public about their place of business, very much putting themselves on show at Savile Row. Press and fans gathered daily outside No. 3, taking pictures and asking questions. There was only one main entrance (together with steps down to the basement, below the front door) so the Beatles couldn’t dodge their visitors. If they hated the attention, they bought the wrong house, and indeed one can only conclude that the boys liked being on display in this way. Paul in particular seemed to enjoy being recognised.

The Beatles brought a large entourage with them to Savile Row: employees, mates, and weird and wonderful hangers-on. Along with the ridiculous Magic Alex, there was Caleb the I-Ching thrower, whose prognostications could make or break an Apple deal; and a House Hippie, American Richard DiLello, who actually had a fairly responsible job in the press office. One of the House Hippie’s tasks was to deliver presentation sets of the first four Apple releases - ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Those Were the Days’, ‘Thingumybob’, and a Jackie Lomax song - to 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and the Queen Mother’s residence. Everybody was delighted when the Queen Mum’s lady-in-waiting wrote back thanking the Beatles for the gift, saying how much HRH had enjoyed their discs. What the Queen herself made of this gift might be surmised from a remark Her Majesty made to EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood around this time: ‘The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?’ It was hard for Sir Joe to gainsay Her Majesty, grappling as he was with a request from John that EMI distribute an album he and Yoko had made named
Unfinished Music Number 1: Two Virgins
. As a record, it was almost unlistenable to, but what was most shocking was that Lennon wanted EMI to distribute the disc in a sleeve that featured full-length nude photos of himself and Yoko - cock, tits, bum, pubic hair and all. ‘What on Earth do you want to do it for?’ Sir Joe asked.

‘It’s art,’ replied Yoko.

‘In that case,’ said the chairman, ‘why not show Paul in the nude? He’s so much better looking.’

Meanwhile, the Beatles were causing chaos in the hallowed EMI Studios, where Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Edward Elgar had made beautiful music, John screaming that he was suicidal and wanted to die on ‘Yer Blues’; Paul shrieking back at him on ‘Helter Skelter’; George singing about pigs, complete with porcine noises. There was, as George himself would say, ‘a weird vibe’. Then Ritchie quit.

‘Now Ringo’s gone, what are we gonna do?’ John Lennon’s cartoon character asks in
Yellow Submarine
after Ringo ejects himself from the sub.

‘Learn to sing trios,’ suggests Old Fred.

‘No, let’s save the poor devil,’ says Paul’s character.

In reality, Paul had been partly responsible for driving their drummer to resignation. Dating back to Quarry Men days, Paul had an unfortunate habit of telling his drummers what to play, and he was quite capable of having a bash himself if they didn’t oblige, which pissed Ritchie off. ‘Every time I went for a cup of tea, he was on the drums!’

Ritchie went round the band telling his friends individually that he was leaving, because he didn’t feel he was playing well, and he felt out of things, whereas ‘you three are really close’. John replied that he thought it was the other three who were close. Paul said the same, while George had always been justified in feeling ignored by Paul and John. In short, all four Beatles now felt isolated and miserable. It didn’t stop them continuing work on the
White Album
in Ringo’s absence, Paul playing the drums again on ‘Back in the USSR’, on the version we hear to this day. Ringo returned shortly thereafter, welcomed back warmly, with flowers arranged around his kit, but the Rubicon had been crossed: a Beatle had left the band.

When Paul came home from these fraught sessions he found Cavendish in chaos. His beautiful green velvet sofa was covered in dog hair; there was dog crap on the carpets; rancid milk and a rind of cheese were all that was to be found in the fridge; unwashed wine glasses, plates and dirty ashtrays littered the living room; his dope stash had been plundered; his expensive gadgets were nearly all broken, his colour TV, the hi-fi and electric curtains were on the fritz; ligger friends camped out his spare rooms; women fought like cats for a place in his grubby bed. When Barry Miles visited, he found several semi-clad chicks in residence. It was all too much, and yet not enough. So Paul reached out to the one woman who had made sense to him in recent months.

Linda Eastman was in California on assignment with her journalist friend Danny Fields when Paul called and invited her to London. She couldn’t come to England immediately. Work commitments took her to San Francisco first, where she photographed the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. As in the past, Linda ended up in bed with one of the musicians, this time Paul’s acquaintance Marty Balin, only she wouldn’t put out. He recalls:

She was a foxy chick, and all of us were trying to make it with her and get close to her and everything. Somehow she ended up with me sleeping the night where I was, at my pad, but she left her bra and her panties on, you know, and I was making my moves, and she just turned me down. She says, ‘I’m going to be with the biggest guy in the world.’ And then later she married Paul McCartney. She knew what she was headed for … She told me flat out - she had her sights set on somebody and that was that.

From Lee Eastman’s point of view, his daughter was now all but a lost cause. First Linda left Mel See to set up in New York as a rock photographer, a course of action Daddy disapproved of. In recent months she had at least managed to get her daughter into Dalton, a good private school in Manhattan, yet no sooner was this arranged than Linda was running off to London after another long-haired boyfriend. With maturity, Linda came to see Daddy’s point of view. ‘I remember Heather was just going to start Dalton and my [father was] so furious with me. She got into Dalton. It would have been great. It was really good for Heather; I wish she had had that kind of life, instead of this crazy life,’ Linda reflected with some sadness towards the end of her own life. ‘But I had no feeling of responsibility, I must have been quite irresponsible to think that a five-year-old kid is starting school for the first time, and I’m buzzing off leaving her.’ Finding somebody to look after Heather in New York, Linda came to London to discover her number one rock star boyfriend living in bachelor squalor at 7 Cavendish Avenue. Paul was not home when she arrived at the house. He was round the corner at EMI with the boys recording ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. Linda went over to Abbey Road and took pictures of the band working. It was late September 1968, almost the end of the Beatles, but the beginning of Paul and Linda’s life together.

13

WEDDING BELLS

PAUL, LINDA AND HEATHER

The Beatles finished the
White Album
with a marathon 24-hour recording session in mid-October 1968. Despite all the problems, there had been a degree of cooperation on the album between John and Paul, both of whom had gone against type in some of the music they had made. Both had contributed challenging songs to the LP (Paul’s ‘Helter Skelter’ for example) as well as gentler, introspective work (John’s ‘Julia’), but probably only Paul could have come up with ‘Honey Pie’, a pastiche of the tea dance tunes Jim Mac’s Jazz Band played in the Twenties; and a love song to his dog, ‘Martha My Dear’. Both are clever and funny, as well as being in keeping with the chocolate assortment nature of the
White Album
. However, ‘I Will’ exemplified Paul’s weakness for the soft-centred love song. The melody was catchy, but the lyric, about loving his beloved forever and ever, etc., was the sickliest cliché, a taste of what was to come.

After the record was finished, John and Yoko were busted for cannabis possession at Montagu Square by the relentless DS Pilcher and his sniffer dog Yogi.
³³
Charges against Yoko were dropped when John pleaded guilty, receiving a fine. Meanwhile, Paul travelled to New York with Linda to meet her daughter.

One night before the New York trip, when Linda was speaking on the phone to Heather, she passed the receiver to Paul, who suggested to the little girl (now coming up for six) that he might marry Mummy. Asking girls to marry them was something the Beatles had always done as a chat-up line, but this time Paul was sincere. He had enjoyed spending time with Linda in Beverly Hills and London. The couple formed a tight unit that mirrored John and Yoko. Apart from being his lover, Linda also had the makings of a steadfast lieutenant in the Beatles Wars. ‘She watched his back,’ Peter Brown comments. ‘She was very, very vigilant in watching his back, totally and utterly loyal, and looked after his needs domestically and in every other way …’ Another quality Paul appreciated was that, having come from money, Linda didn’t seem interested in his wealth. She preferred a simple life, as he did to a degree. So when Paul and Linda came to New York they didn’t check into a deluxe hotel, but stayed at Linda’s apartment on East 83rd Street, exploring the city by walking around and riding the subways like any other couple.

To help him get about unrecognised, Paul bought an old coat from a thrift shop and let his beard grow, giving him a Fenian look. Thus disguised, he went to Harlem with Linda to see shows at the Apollo Theater and generally mooched about the city, an experience very different from his previous visits to New York. Anything Paul wanted to do seemed possible with Linda, or Lin as he called her affectionately. She had bucket-loads of American confidence, which he liked. Both were relaxed and open about sex. They told each other everything about their past (and there was a lot to tell!). Lin dug rock ’n’ roll in a way Jane never had, and unlike Jane this American girl wasn’t uptight about drugs. Although a modern, liberated woman in some ways, Lin wasn’t a committed careerist. She was already tired of scratching a living as a rock ’n’ roll photographer, more than ready to settle down with a man who could look after her and Heather. She would happily allow Paul to take the traditional masculine role, which seemed like the natural order to a young man who, despite his sophisticated life, was a product of England’s conservative northern working-class. Conversely, there was a hippie chick, go-with-the-flow looseness about Lin that Paul dug, exemplified when they were out walking with Heather and Lin said she had to do an errand on her own, but Heather could lead Paul back to the apartment if he got her to the 86th Street subway. So Paul let the little girl take him home. It was such a relaxed and pleasant journey - so different to his normal life - that he found himself singing a happy tune as he walked with the child to the apartment, a tune that became ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’.

When Linda took Paul to meet her father at his apartment on Park Avenue, Lee Eastman didn’t go out of his way to make friends with the new boyfriend. It was his method to challenge new people, to see what they were made of, and Paul seemed intimidated at first. ‘Paul was scared to death of him,’ states Linda’s stepbrother Philip Sprayregen, whose mother Monique had become Lee’s second wife. ‘When my father got mad, his face would turn red … It was very intimidating to behold.’ When Lee spoke condescendingly to Lin at dinner, however, Paul defended his girlfriend stoutly, took her by the hand and led her out of the apartment. It was a demonstration that he wasn’t to be pushed any further, and he and Lee got along better after this.

Aside from her family and her rock ’n’ roll contacts, Linda’s New York circle was mostly comprised of journalists like Danny Fields, now a publicist at Elektra Records. Her other closest pals were Lillian Roxon, New York correspondent for the
Sydney Morning Herald
, and Blair Sabol, who wrote for the
Village Voice
. Although Linda had told Danny she was going to London to see Paul, now they were back in New York as a couple Paul and Linda didn’t call her friends. It seems they had decided that Lin would have to drop the journalists, for fear they might write about them. It was 18 months before Blair, Danny and Lillian heard from Linda again, at which point Danny and Linda did resume their friendship, but Linda never smoothed over the rift with Blair and Lillian, who were terribly offended at being dropped in this way. Lillian died, still embittered against Linda, in 1973. Fields: ‘Linda said to me the biggest regret of her life was not making up with Lillian.’

Clearly Paul and Linda were a couple heading for marriage. Passing a door in New York’s Chinatown Paul saw a sign advertising that Buddhist weddings were conducted within. ‘C’mon, let’s go and get married,’ he said. Linda declined, explaining that her failed marriage to Mel See was too recent for her to want to marry again in a hurry. This would seem to contradict stories told by the likes of Nat Weiss that Linda was set on marrying Paul from the start, and it has been used by Paul and Linda as such a defence. But perhaps she was just too canny to rush into a ‘Buddhist wedding’ of dubious legality; better to bide her time and do it properly. If Paul had asked her once to marry him, he would ask again. In any event, Paul and Linda were solid enough to take Heather with them when they returned to England at the end of October 1968.

Adjusting to life in the UK did not prove easy for Linda’s daughter. Having suffered the break-up of her parents when she was a toddler, and had the disorientating experience of being taken to live in New York, where Mom had an ever-changing cast of boyfriends, Heather was now relocated to a foreign country where the people, contrary to the reputation the British enjoy for good manners, were beastly towards her. The big girls who stood outside Paul’s house were the worst, giving Heather and her Mommy filthy looks when they passed and writing words on the gate that Heather, thankfully, couldn’t read. Children her own age weren’t much nicer. Placed in Robinsfield Infants, a private school in St John’s Wood, Heather was picked on for being different, that is to say American. Nobody wanted to be her friend. Paul suggested Heather sit quietly reading a book, and kids would come over to her out of curiosity. She told Paul sadly that she’d tried that and it didn’t work. ‘I don’t think she made too many friends there,’ Paul has said. ‘She wasn’t desperate or anything, she was just a little sad because [she’s] very friendly.’

At the same time, Heather’s new ‘Daddy’ received all this attention. ‘It was so extreme. A [six]-year-old can’t comprehend fame and I had no concept of Paul’s world,’ she would say in adult life. After the period when kids shunned Heather came a second phase when schoolmates took an interest in her because of who ‘Daddy’ was. ‘From a child’s point of view it was hard to understand.’ Indeed, being brought up in Paul’s shadow would blight Heather’s life, which proved a troubled one with a
leitmotif
of pathos. There was a good side to having Paul as Dad; Paul liked children and was a thoughtful, attentive, funny and energetic father-figure. He lived in a cool house, what appeared to an American child as a beautiful English doll’s house, for 7 Cavendish Avenue had that classic, symmetrical look. It was full of interesting things, with a large walled garden, and plenty of pets to play with. Heather was as soppy about animals as Mommy was. In addition, there was the farm in Scotland.

Paul took Linda and Heather to Kintyre as soon as possible, and mother and daughter fell in love with the place. Different though it was from Arizona, here was another wild empty landscape in which Linda could ride for miles. Paul and Heather both took up horse-riding and rode with her, developing a good seat. Linda found the light conducive for taking photographs; while, perhaps best of all, she and Paul and Heather could be alone together away from the press, the fans and the other Beatles. Admittedly, the steading was in a poor condition. Paul liked High Park tumbledown. Linda persuaded him to make some elementary home improvements: they bought bits of furniture in Campbeltown; Paul made a sofa from old packing crates, naming it
Sharp’s Express
after wording stencilled on the side; they laid a new floor; and Linda ran up simple plaid curtains. The cottage was suddenly much more welcoming. After a long walk through the heather, or along nearby Westport Beach, there were long, deliciously quiet family evenings in front of the log fire. When Linda mentioned that she wanted to stop using the Pill, Paul agreed and she fell pregnant. Marriage was inevitable now, and Paul felt ready. One day Lin said, ‘You know, I could make you a great home.’ It was exactly what he wanted to hear.

THE BEATLES’ WINTER OF DISCONTENT

One of the important points to make about the Beatles’ mature period is that their albums were complete works of art, what Richard Wagner called
Gesamtkunstwerk
, music and lyrics complemented by visual presentation. Since
Sgt. Pepper
, Paul had come up with the essential concept for the album covers, working with first-class people to realise his ideas. Having employed Peter Blake and his wife Jann on
Sgt. Pepper
, Paul now turned to another significant British artist, Richard Hamilton, considered the founder of Pop Art, which he defined in 1957 as being popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business. Which summed up album-cover design perfectly.

Paul’s art dealer Robert Fraser brought Hamilton and the Beatles together, setting up a meeting at Savile Row. Inevitably Paul kept his visitor waiting, and as Hamilton sat watching the beautiful people flounce by he became bored and irritated. By the time he was admitted to Paul’s presence, Hamilton was really disgruntled. ‘So when he said that they wanted me to do the cover of this album they were working on, I said, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”’ Hamilton recalled to the author Michael Bracewell.

‘Come on, haven’t you got any ideas?’ Paul asked.

‘Well, my best idea is to leave a white cover,’ replied Hamilton. He hadn’t intended to do a white cover when he came to the meeting. The notion occurred to him on the spur of the moment, almost as a put-down to Paul in response to being kept waiting and all the nonsense he saw surrounding the Beatles. To Hamilton’s surprise, Paul agreed.

As to an album title, the band had debated several names, including
A Doll’s House
, after Ibsen. Hamilton said that if they were going for simplicity they should call it
The Beatles
. Surprisingly, neither EMI nor Capitol had released an LP under that most elementary of titles, so
The Beatles
it was, and Hamilton set to work on his now-famous, absolutely simple, white gatefold sleeve, stamped with a blind impression of the title and initially a number. Like a limited edition art print, every copy of the album would in theory be numbered, the Beatles themselves getting numbers one to four. To give their fans something to look at, colour headshots of each band member would be slipped inside the sleeve together with a fold-out lyric sheet on the reverse of which was a collage poster. In response to a request from Hamilton, Paul collected snapshots from John, George, Ritchie and Linda - including a picture of Paul in his bath at Cavendish - then watched the artist assemble the items for the poster.

The album was a nightmare as far as sales reps were concerned. Shoppers searching through the shop racks for the new Beatles LP would not see the band’s picture on the cover, nor could they easily make out the band name, while the idea of naming the Beatles’ ninth (regular UK) album
The Beatles
, as if it were their first, was absurd. The music was also challenging in places. George Martin was of the opinion that the boys should have distilled one album from the 30 songs they recorded, instead of releasing a double album, but for once he was surely wrong. The capaciousness of the
White Album
is one of its strengths, allowing the Beatles to demonstrate their range. If ‘Revolution 9’ wasn’t to your taste, there were plenty of other accessible and pretty tunes to listen to: the likes of ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Julia’. In any event, despite its arty look, double album price and difficult tracks, the
White Album
sold sensationally well, going to number one in the UK and US, becoming an album that is rediscovered generation after generation, one of their best-selling albums ever in the USA.
³⁴

In some ways the often spiky and confrontational
White Album
seems more of a John album that a Paul record. Yet without Paul’s major contributions - the top three being ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Helter Skelter’ - it would not have become the classic it is. Paul clearly still possessed a Midas touch, with the Beatles and outside projects, such as when he helped the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.